Condescendingly hateful, in a disgusting, smarmy way. Morally and intellectually bankrupt. Totally offensive. You should be deeply ashamed of yourself. Being Gay is nothing like alcoholism. One can operate heavy machinery while under the influence of Gay. You can’t even bring yourself to write “Gay,” can you? It’s unspeakably hateful to refuse to call a community and a group of people by what they call themselves. This is very racist-like, for starters…to define others rather than respect them. To claim to love the “other” while trying to destroy their community and identity…to make a minority hidden, compliant, silent, segregated. Why should I respect you?

Christianity isn’t, or at least doesn’t have to be, the absurd, superstitious fertility cult you make it out to be. Social relations don’t have to be based upon ancient ignorance of sex and science. Classical Green and medieval logic isn’t…all that logical anymore.

Ancients didn’t even know about the human ovum, which was not discovered until the 19th Century, if memory serves. Our most basic understanding of conception, of the fertilization of the ovum by a spermatazoa wasn’t confirmed until the 1850s. The knowledge that women are the equal of men in creating life, that life didn’t begin at the moment of ejaculation, that life began eons ago, that the scientific discipline of sexology is largely a 20th Century discovery…is apparently nothing you need concern yourself with. You know better than woman and GLBT people. You don’t have to listen to them, that’s apparently what religious authority is about. You are a religious authority starting with the sheer, random chance of getting a a “Y” chromosome…something not in the Bible or in natural law.

By the way, I have a genetic disease that was once a very horrible way to die, in pain that opiates couldn’t diminish, insane, blind, crippled. Why should I respect someone who would have wanted me to slowly die that way, in blind, all consuming pain, just to exercise..to boast, really, of your religious authority?

You worked hard to become a Cardinal…but as this article illuminates all too well, not hard enough. If I hadn’t studied sociology, I would wonder how you sleep at night.

Gregory’s words are those of a man whose life is apparently totally controlled by his addiction. I see this all the time when someone speaks out against this society’s total adoption of the homosexual way. So sad. I wish there was some way to help him and those like him to see the truth, but how do you break through to someone so totally controlled? Prayer…

Cardinal Burke is absolutely correct in his assessment of the issue and Courage’s mission.

However, in my long held opinion, the Courage ministry has a couple of weaknesses that should be considered.

First, the homosexual has a disorder, and don’t we all.  As we know, that disorder, the attraction toward a same sex person, can be diminished by a chaste life and prayer.  But as with every disorder, the ultimate goal should be a full healing, in the case of homosexuality into a fully heterosexual person.

That metamorphosis has a greater chance of happening if certain “rules” of human development and psychology are followed. And that should be our prayer. That to road to full healing can be found for those with homosexual attractions.

First, inclinations or habits or temptations are either increased or changed in response to our actions.  Frankly, it seems that if we hang around with people who have the disorder, we are more likely to keep the underlying attraction, whereas if we hang around with those who do not have it, we are more likely to adopt their way of being. We know the AA concept of dry alcoholic.  Therefore, as wonderful as 12 steps are, I think we have to ask ourselves the question if it helps homosexuals to hang around with each other in 12 step programs regardless of how chaste they are. Would they not be more inclined to slowly and subtlety change way deep inside if they hang around with those who have developed completely out of SSA or who have never had it?  In counseling psychology, the effects of role playing are well known and ultimately seeing others who do not have SSA is a type of role playing.

Further, Catholic medical moral theology has always held that we have a duty to take ordinary means to heal our diseases.  Currently, the attempts at healing therapies tend, with all due respect to the practitioners, a one size fits all approach.  It works with some, but not all. It seems, at this time not to be ordinary, but quite expensive and difficult.

The emerging field of brain science promises to give us tools to help all sorts of psychological and developmental issues in unprecedented ways. Should we not pray that study of that science with a focus on SAA be a
focus of courageous doctors and scientists?

Anyway, for discussion and better minds than mine, I await discussion on this thread and elsewhere the ideal that we should work very hard to develop an effective and ordinary way for those with SSA to become at one with their body, rather than being at odds with it.

Totally agree with the comment by Gregory Peterson!
Cardinal Burke’s assertions—despite his high position within the Roman hierarchy—are so un-Christlike and antithetical to the Gospel that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s also a scandal that a Cardinal would perpetuate such intellectually vacuous balderdash (though “The Borgia’s” TV series reminds us so powerfully that a Cardinal’s scarlet is hardly an indication of either wisdom or a pastor’s heart).
Burke writes about the importance of recognizing one’s “true identity” as a child of God, yet presumes to know a priori what that identity is for ALL God’s children, failing to recognize or even admit that there is immense diversity within God’s family. As every reputable field of human inquiry is coming to know—medicine, psychology, anthropology, sociology, biology, and yes, even theology—one’s sexual orientation is a relatively fixed facet of our deepest and core identity. In other words, those of us who are gay are gay because God made us so. Yes, I know that I am a child of God; I know that I am created in the image and likeness of God ... and I also know that that the image and likeness of the Divine is expressed in specific individuals, not in some abstract generality. Burke speaks of “Christian anthropology, of the nature of man, male and female,” all the while forgetting that these are labels and categories meant to be tools to help with understanding; but that categories and labels are abstractions from the realities (i.e. real people), and that it’s the realities that are important. If there’s a conflict or disconnect between a reality and its explanation, it’s the explanation which must change, not the reality. And even the Church, until recently, recognized the reality that God created gay and lesbian people as gay and lesbian. There is immense arrogance in presuming to know in toto what “the nature of man” is, and then to attempt to retrofit this extremely limited perspective back onto real people.
Cardinal Burke ... please recognize the immense harm your words do to so many of God’s good and loving gay and lesbian children. May God open your eyes and your heart to see ALL God’s children as GOD created them to be, not as you would want them to be.

Gregory: It’s not necessarily “unspeakably hateful” to call a group of people by what they call themselves. I call pedophiles “pedophiles” and not “child-lovers” and “boy-lovers” as they call themselves; I don’t consider that to be hateful, although they might; the difference is mainly in social acceptance, not in the terms themselves. What about those who you call “gay” who do not want their identity to be defined by you? Those are precisely the ones who Courage seeks to serve, they are the ones who rebel against the label you and society have placed upon them. You have absolutely no problem defining them and telling them how they should behave, you have no problem with telling them who they really are and how they should see themselves. “Being gay” is nothing like alcoholism, sure, but that isn’t what Courage is meant to address. Courage doesn’t seek to cure people of “being gay”, its purpose is to help those with same-sex attractions lead chaste lives, which, as a heterosexual man, I can tell you is a struggle very much like fighting alcoholism (and I hear is particularly difficult in “gay” culture). I also don’t understand what the point of your science overview is. It changes nothing about what human beings have always understood- it takes a man and a woman to make a child. You do realize that the reason why there was an emphasis of belief on the male providing the “seed” is because otherwise it would be erroneously assumed that the woman conceived spontaneously? The ancient view of reproduction has never been male-centric, that would be unbelievably stupid because the most obvious thing in the world is that the woman is at the core of new life; there is something about being pregnant for 9 months and then giving birth to a baby in a giant bloody and painful ordeal such that even pagans understood that women, not men, were at the core of reproduction -_- On the contrary, the assumption of the male “seed” was a realization that reproduction is not solely woman-centric; the man must provide something that she does not have. This is absolutely true, and while our understanding of its workings have obviously been refined, the scientific clarifications have changed nothing about the natural order of man and woman.

What is the genetic disease that you say the Church wants you to die of, and how do you figure? The Church doesn’t want you to die, and doesn’t want you to be in pain, and isn’t interested in exercising religious authority to make you suffer. Christ didn’t come to make us suffer. He came to show us the way, the way of love and the way of peace. He came to show us that the way of love and the way of peace can often be the way of the Cross as well, but we walk and proclaim Christ crucified not because we seek that suffering and death, but because we know they count for nothing against His glory and Resurrection. Truly we must be willing to drink of the cup that Christ drinks and take up our crosses and follow Him, yet His yoke is easy and His burden light. In Christ is found the strength that can overcome all; He doesn’t desire our suffering and death, He wants to give us His life that can be found even in the midst of great suffering and that overcomes even death. That is the cry of the Church. Not authority (although it has this also), but simply Christ, crucified and risen. Peace be with you, Gregory.

I am sure that Cardinal Burke intended no insult to everyone but the teachings of the Church and the natural law cannot be subserviant to each one’s preferences.  The fact is that God made human bodies male and female - to fit, to complement each other.  In very basic terms a key does not fit into another key nor a lock into another lock. Each has its purpose as does each human being. God makes no one ‘gay’ (why the title ‘gay’?). Each of us is responsible to God for our actions - inclinations are not the same as actions. Someone may be ‘inclined’ to commit adultery because of a powerful sexual attraction to another man’s wife, but inclination is not a sin. We are responsible for how we respond to our ‘inclinations’...none of us can do everything we desire to do or are inclined to do. No disrespect is intended…we all have temptations we struggle with and it’s never easy…we just have to keep doing the best we can.

Mr MacGeorge, in addition to displaying a weakness in the apprehension of semiotics, is quite judgmental about others while demanding others surrender to the intellectual fashions of the day - as though truth were a product of the social sciences rather than a result of Divine Revelation mediated by the Catholic Church guided as she is in these moral matters by the Third Person of The Blessed Trinity.

He who has science as his master has wed himself to the enlightenment and that is a marriage made in hell

Your church has no right to tell others how to live. It’s a shame that you verbally abuse your own homosexual children for their entire lives but I do not have to live by it.

This is why you are increasingly perceived as hateful-‘cause you are and you show it.

I am a woman who has been married to the same man for almost 42 years. I didn’t choose to be straight. I was made by God the way I am, just as someone who is gay, was made by God and loved by God, the way they are.  I agree with Gregory and Tim.  I find this article by Cardinal Burke more than ‘troubling’ on so many fronts but I think the part that disturbed me the most was: “The real issue in dealing with parents of homosexuals is to help them develop their own relationship with the Lord. They must turn over stewardship of their child to the Lord, allowing him to bring healing to their own hearts and to the hearts of all the family.” Stewardship is defined as “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to ones care”.  People have 401’s that they may trust to an entity, not their children.  As a parent, even though my two daughters are now adults and happen to be straight, I would not give up the ‘stewardship’ of my children to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church or anyone else! The pedophile crisis that occurred and is at times still occurring, was when parents did that very thing-telling their children they can trust a priest without question (and no, gays are no more likely to be pedophiles than straights). I find that statement so offensive, the idea that I would give up my rights as a parent-they are my most treasured gift from God.

Would Claire, citizen and Gregory be kind enough to point out the specific words of “hatred” in this article, and demonstrate or describe exactly how these words are “hateful?”. Thank you.

Very sad to see comments such as Greg’s or Tim’s or ‘citizens’. If you only could see the truth and embrace it- you would be so free- and truly happy.

The Bible talks about a phenomenon called “iniquity.” It is a sin state whereby the sinner has committed grave sin, repetitively and unrepentantly and is usually pandering to self-idolatry and illicit sexual activities. The person’s mind is turned over to a darkened intellect, a dullness of mind, because of the activities in which they engage and they can no longer reason about their own behavior. Some Catholic therapists call it a demonic hold. Theologians call it a state of lawlessness of the heart. That is why no matter how cohesive one makes the “not born gay” rationale, those who practice and promote homosexual behavior will not see. They cannot see. Only in God’s time and with the cooperation of the sinner will he be released.

the Courage Conference was wonderful!

How sad that we judge people based on their sexual attraction. You will never be able to reach out to a homosexual person if you begin with the premise that their sexuality makes them mentally defective.  This is not how Jesus treated sinners.  To me this seems like a violation of the commandment, “love your neighbor as yourself.“If you love someone you love them for who they are, you don’t try to change them. To paraphrase St. Ambrose, “it is more important to talk to God about your homosexual friend than to talk to your homosexual friend about God.” Love, don’t judge!

@I am not Spartacus:  I find it noteworthy that the only ones here who do not feel the need to post anonymously behind a screen name are myself and Gregory Peterson, both of whom have posted thoughtful, albeit strongly worded, critiques of Cardinal Burke’s assertions. The problem here is that the hierarchy—and the assertions which are sadly and reflexively parroted here by so many—is that those who hold such perspectives are so unwilling or uninterested in engagement and dialogue with God’s gay and lesbian children. Organizations such as DignityUSA, Fortunate Families, Catholics for Equality, New Ways Ministry ... these would all truly welcome the opportunity to share with bishops the real and lived experience of God’s LGBT children. Unfortunately, “dialogue” means listening, and it means being open to the possibility of coming to a conclusion (or even an interim perspective) that differs from where one started. The Scriptures and the Life of Jesus all bespeak that the Divine way is to engage with the other, to interact with the other, to be present to the other. Sadly, the “ministerial” approach of most current hierarchs is to lay heavy burdens on the shoulders of others, without knowing the other or even the weight of those burdens. (Oh, btw, it’s Fr. MacGeorge).—God’s Peace to you!

I think I demonstrated why, even though “hate” isn’t mentioned in the Cardinal’s article, it is hateful nevertheless, in a racist-like way. Go read the “moderate” 1950s race segregationist writings. They “loved” Black people, and somehow knew, usually by quoting Bible verses, what God wanted for them and society as a whole…white hegemony.

Comparing Gay people with pedophiles is disgusting. Pedophilia is about statutory rape and a perversion of authority. “Gay” is about respecting personal integrity, something that pedophiles obviously don’t do. Identifying as Gay is a declaration of personal integrity and self worth.

The church, by not allowing the social space for loving, mutually consenting, adult same-sex relationships, is therefore coercing (abusing authority) Gay people to be celibate. Priests are not coerced into being priests. They therefore consent, as adults, to take the vow of celibacy. The church is more or less demanding that all Catholic Gay people be celibate, thereby disrespecting their personal, adult integrity and is instead, treating adult Gay people like children.

Fr. MacGeorge, Gregory Peterson, et.al.—anonymity is the choice of the poster. Surely, you can understand the struck into the hearts of those who oppose the homosexual agenda by their treatment at the hands of Prop. 8 supporters following that measure’s failure in CA a few years back.  We do not desire blacklisting or vicious, hateful targeting by those supporting a homosexual agenda.  Who is really being oppressed, here?

Also, I note that none of those lashing out at Card. Burke have answered my question: Please point out exactly what is hateful in the cardinal’s comments, and why it is hateful. BTW, Fr. MaccGeorge:  The cardinal was not making “assertions” as you note, he was echoing the teachings of the Catholic Church.  Pls adjust your rhetoric accordingly. 

Lastly, Fr. Tim MacGeorge - I see from a brief internet search that you represent Dignity in Northern VA.  Must be hard for you to see the competition from Courage, which is the *only* organization approved by the Church for ministry to those experiencing same-sex attraction.  Tough to get a cardinal to come and speak at a Dignity conference, I am guessing.  No big names on the marquee.  Dignity is outside the Catholic Church, as is your support of womens’ ordination, also linked on your website.  http://www.dignitynova.org/4.html  You are leading souls directly into the pit of Hell.  Please repent and be faithful to the Gospel.

Dear Gregory Peterson:

You accuse the Church of   “treating adult Gay people like children.”

That must mean you accuse Our Lord of treating His flock like children, when He said:  “Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”  Matthew 18:3.

We must *all* turn from sin and be innocent to enter the Kingdom of God. You want God to change to accommodate your sins.  It doesn’t work that way.

The Church does not demand anything from anybody.  The Church teaches the Truth and is obliged to teach the Truth!  Please re-read the section in the CCC on homosexuality and find where “demands” and “coercion” are indicated.

I attended the conference. It was a great place to share our faith and our hope.  There was almost no talk about politics, just about how we can grow in our faith. I realize that many do not understand why some of us with a homosexual orientation choose this path, but as difficult as it has been I find peace and real friendship among my brothers and sisters that choose that path of chastity in a culture that scorns us and rejects us.

God loves me just as I am. However, he loves me far too much to let me stay that way.

That’s true of homosexuals just as it’s true of me. God’s love is in sending Jesus. There is not an instant portal to heaven. It’s a *way* to God. But the Christian walk means you don’t just sit still and feel OK just as you are.

The process of sanctification is like taking a shower after you’ve gotten very dirty. You have to actually scrub off the uncleanness. The same thing is true with our sin. We must work towards that.